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Somerville High students walk out in protest of gun slaughter

Tim Devin watched Somerville High School students get into the positions they've been taught to assume during a school lockdown in a walkout this morning to call for restrictions of guns used for mass murders.

I disagree they are "light years" ahead..
Killing each other with guns was not a thing we did to each other when we were kids. I'm not just talking the mass murders, I'm talking kids having "beef's" with others that they only solve with guns.

Don’t be fooled by the selfie generation. The Kendall Jenner “cool protester” TV commercial was controversial simply because it exposed the truth: that protest for this cohort is commonly just fashion, not something intellectual. We all know teens who have been to a half dozen protests already. They show their best act or demonstration to the cameras, because everything is for the camera! Look at me, boo, I’m the new Rosa Parks - retweet. The selfie generation brings only the emotion, perfected by their actor and actress icons in media, but the selfie generation is largely hollow and shallow inside the facade of their extreme emotionality. Please don’t let them vote until they are 26 (the Obamacare age of fully formed brain). These dramatic narcissists who find their way to identifying as victims through intersectionality and other transitive properties are far from ready to govern us. These kids are only ready for their semi-accurate reenactments of political activism and other recitals. Strike a pose, there’s nothing to it.

Nobody's talking about electing an 18-year-old as you Supreme Leader. In the meantime, settle back into your easy chair on put on some Fox News.

And, no, that commercial wasn't controversial because it exposed anything, because it didn't. Advertisers have been trying to co-opt protest movements since at least the '60s, and the disgust was along the lines of what we saw after that Super Bowl commercial using Martin Luther King's words to sell pickup trucks.

because the only student protests that ever meant anything were the boomers, amirite, back when smoking weed really MEANT something.

I'm an (older) millennial and I gotta say, I'm super proud of this oldest edge of the new gen z cohort. my generation ended up kind of disillusioned and worn out and nihilistic between the recession and loans and housing prices and the unending being shit upon by boomers; these kids are here and passionate and angry about the injustice of it all. yeah, they take selfies, because they understand the power of selfies and visibility and uniting in visible ways. they express themselves online because the old media is stacked pretty ridiculously against them, and isn't interested in helping their cause. they've figured out where we fucked it up with occupy and blm and all our other movements that tried to establish legitimacy in a system that wasn't ever interested in helping those causes.

It's really not that hard to understand. 2012, a generation of children lived in terror that they would get gunned down in their own elementary schools just like the kids at Sandy Hook. 2018, that same generation of teenagers live in fear that they would get gunned down in their own secondary schools just like in Florida. Twice they lived through this, twice they've seen leaders do nothing to protect them. The GOP and NRA, through their own inaction, are creating an entire generation of soon to be voters who want an end to guns and who know the GOP isn't looking out for them. So by all means, keep doing nothing and you'll be extinct as a party in less than 10 years.

I remember myself at 26, and I'm not sure I should have been trusted with the franchise. So make it even older.

Voting by the elderly also has its problems, however; memory loss, ingrained habit, lack of exposure to information about how other people live today, and, of course, good old dementia.

I have fed all these concerns into my Voting Age Optimization Program, and it has informed me that people should not become eligible to vote until they are forty-six, and that such eligibility should expire when they turn thirty-eight. I've tried to reason with it, but to no avail.

And probably more common today (thankfully) than in recent decades, with some exceptions: When I was a senior in high school, student government organized a sit-in that shut our school down for a morning to protest the Town's cuts to the school budget that resulted in the layoffs of five popular non-tenured teachers (If I recall correctly, some of the positions were restored a month later when Town Meeting reconvened and passed a new municipal budget that funded the positions). The excerpt cited above states it was 150 students protesting, but to the best of my knowledge, it was likely closer to 900 -the vast majority of the student population in all four classes. I also remember the school administration handling it very well. They let us have our say: they listened, let the press do interviews, addressed the issues, and then when it was done, told us it was time to resume classes (with the threat of suspension, etc for those who didn't end it), in the end, we respectfully ended the protest, but it was talked about for the rest of the day. It was a valuable lesson in civic engagement.

Only restrictions for guns used for mass murdering. Okay for to use any gun to shoot at each other in our own city's neighborhoods is okay, though? Remember the 2017 stats that came out on the number of deaths to young black men due to gun violence in Boston? Let's try to stop that also.

As an old Boomer, I am sensing something in these students that (forgive me for painting with a broad brush) I did not see in millennials who seemed more flighty and entitled. These kids mean business.

Kudos to these kids indeed. But many Millennials are in their 30s now. We sure as hell didn't have smart phones or social media to plan protests and tell Marco Rubio he sucks. If there was a protest, sites like Uhub were pretty much non existent to report on them. Maybe just don't generalize a billion people.

"We sure as hell didn't have smart phones or social media to plan protests and tell Marco Rubio he sucks. If there was a protest, sites like Uhub were pretty much non existent to report on them."

That's limited thinking. The 1960s generation didn't have social media or smart phones either and they did a darn good job of organizing and protesting things like the senseless war in Vietnam, and organizing massive (and effective) marches for civil rights.

piss themselves when you take their back-lit screen away from them. I will refer you to the recent story of a group of teens beating down a 70 year old woman at Tino's Pizza in Milton when the owners told one of them they couldn't charge their phone there.
Gen Y/ Millennials learned pretty quick that we were screwed, that we wouldn't have it better than our parents, that the boomers did all the drugs, had all the sex, and basically ruined everything for future generations, so why try?
I commend these young kids for their spirit. It hasn't been broken yet. It will be when NOTHING meaningful happens in the way of gun legislation and the next mass shooting happens, or the lead Boomer takes us to war with North Korea, or Kim Kardasian says something racist or announces her plans to change her gender. These events won't even make foot note status in the history books.

These kids piss themselves when you take their back-lit screen away from them.

Gen Y/ Millennials learned pretty quick that we were screwed, that we wouldn't have it better than our parents, that the boomers did all the drugs, had all the sex, and basically ruined everything for future generations, so why try?

Dude, I cannot believe that you're simultaneously crapping on both Gen Z and boomers, both with absolute bullshit generalizations, in the same rant. You are one whiny bastard.

I sense in boomers a tendency to overstate their own hardships, overlook the problems they created for future generations, (economic, environmental, diplomatic, etc) and then mock those who got stuck dealing with those problems.

The Boomers were Gen X's parents, Gen X are the Millennial's parents. So you Gen X needs to take the blame for the participation trophies. The Boomers are guilty of a lot of sins, but that doesn't happen to be one of them...

I'm one of the older millenials (1984.) When I was in college, one of my professors was discussing the war in Afghanistan/Iraq and various social issues, and said that she didn't understand why none of us walked out or protested, because when she was in school, campus protests for political reasons were so big, campuses were shutting down. She wanted to know why our generation was different.

The answer she got from the class was:
"It's too expensive."
"Our tuition breaks down to $75 per class hour"
"$75? No that was last year, it's $82 this year."

There is a time and a place for protesting. When you walk out of class and take away class time from your own education- which benefits you, not your teachers or professors, and certainly not politicians- you are only shortchanging yourself, not "the man."

Longer: I'm an older millennial. I was in high school in 1998-2002. Remember when we wanted to protest things and could take out our phones and make Youtube videos and post them on Twitter? No? Because none of those things existed. The first image shared from a phone was in 1997. We had IRC and AIM. AOL was actually cool. We could sort of hack stuff together in html. That's about it.

So maybe the TL;DR wasn't appropriate: you had no way to pay attention. In 2000, my class was the guinea pig year for MCAS: 13 hours of meaningless testing, with no long-term ramifications. (And, no, I'm not equating this with the #NeverAgain movement, but then again no one was coming in and shooting up our schools with AR-15s, although Columbine scared the shit out of us. Also we had an assault weapons ban, which we at least still have in Massachusetts, which is why the guy in Winchester killed one person with a knife and didn't shoot up the whole library.) Students hated it. Teachers pretended not to have opinions, but it was clear they weren't fans. Was there an easy way to have a statewide boycott which would render the test meaningless (basically: everyone leaving it blank)? Nope, not really. Because it was hard to get beyond talking to each other, and making posters to hang in the halls.

The upside of this is that we developed a lot of skills which the younger millennial set didn't. The ability to read a map and get somewhere without your phone yelling directions. The ability to write a letter using words and punctuation and grammar and not emoji and little pictures and GIFs and abbreviations.

But, yeah, sorry we didn't make you aware of our concern for things using technology we didn't have.

(And, also, as an older boomer your cohort is responsible for everything we're dealing with, so maybe you should be the ones out on the street.)

Remember when the Founding Fathers all huddled in the streets with doe eyes, looking for attention. Remember how that got the attention of the King, and he got off our back with the taxes and all was well?

Remember ANY TIME in history that squatting down in the street to make a show for the media got any respect from anyone? The heroes of the left get a special place in history for their huddling in fear for the cameras. Remember Cindy Sheerin lying in a sewer ditch at the Reagan ranch protesting war? How did that work? Remember the girl who lay down in front of the bulldozer in Gaza?

"Attention seekers playing the role of victim off someone else' tragedy."

That's exactly how I would have felt 5-6 years ago.. Even much of the Occupy Wall Street counterpart in Dewey Square seemed like posing to me, Millenials playing at being rebels. I even remember one of them saying on the news "I've been waiting all my life for something like this". There is something deeper with these students. Lives are being lost. It's not just the "I want a high paying job" or whatever the still undefined goal of the Occupy era was.

Marches and protests get short-term attention, and participants feel like they're being heard, but honestly, I don't feel they accomplish anything in the long run.

If these kids really want to change the world, maybe they could examine how they treat each other in their day to day lives.

So many kids are ostracized and shunned by their peers for being different. Being ganged up on by their peers in person and especially on social media is devastating and easily sends kids over the edge to commit suicide or pick up a gun.

Is banning guns the answer, or changing the behaviors that lead someone to think that killing themselves or others is the only way out?

It wasn't that long ago that children were taught to huddle under their desks for fear that they, their classmates, and everything within 25 miles would be vaporized. As an adult you wonder why, the desk certainly isn't bomb proof. Hiding on the ground today just makes you an immobile target.
This stuff is why there are so many conspiracy theorists.

Long enough ago that I wasn't taught that, going to school in New York City--and I was born when Kennedy was president.

Maybe because my teachers knew how useless that would be. A basement might be some good against fallout, though--if missiles are being fired across the ocean, they're not aimed at a particular corner of a public school, so "immobile target" is irrelevant.